Daily Digest 11/1 - The Psychology Of Irrational Fear, Making Treasure From Trash?

Economy

The stark difference in the care available in West Africa and the United States is reflected in the outcomes, as well. In West Africa, 70 percent of people with Ebola are dying, while seven of the first eight Ebola patients treated in the United States have walked out of the hospital in good health. Only one died: Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian, whose treatment was delayed when a Dallas hospital initially misdiagnosed his illness.

Call it Ebolanoia. A recent CBS poll found that 80 percent of Americans now think U.S. citizens who travel to West Africa should be quarantined upon their return, even though most health experts think that would only make Africa’s Ebola outbreak worse.

Of course, Ebola is partly a stand-in for our ongoing collective anxieties, ever simmering and child-leash-purchase inducing. In calmer times, we might instead be wringing our hands over gluten, swine flu, or that illegal immigrants are coming here to “steal our jobs.”

But here’s the thing about rocket science — it’s rocket science: Expensive, dangerous, fraught with peril. It is sickening to me that we as a country have folded our wings and folded our cards when it comes to all manner of flight. Never mind manned flight to Mars, we no longer have the stomach or will to get off the launch pad.

Never, ever reveal the source of your funding. “I am religious about not allowing company names to ever get used,” Berman said. “And I don’t want companies to ever admit that because it does give the other side a way to diminish our message.”

The U.S. shale revolution has driven oil output to the highest in more than three decades, reducing America’s need for overseas purchases and sinking global prices into a bear market. South Korea is seeking to reduce its dependence on Middle East crude just as OPEC’s biggest members discount supplies to protect market share and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. predicts the group is losing influence.

“I’m trying to ask big questions of where the Earth’s water came from,” he says. “One of the reasons I study rocks is they allow us to peer back in time.” Jacobsen had tried to replicate in the lab the kind of ringwoodite formed hundreds of kilometres down, but was unable to – unless he added water.

“It provides depth and colour to the stories of their products, provides access to new customers, new markets and even to influential media members that may otherwise be uninterested,” explained Alex Morgan, senior manager of sustainable value chains and sustainable agriculture at the Rainforest Alliance.

Many small-scale or eco-entrepreneurs are finding success by upcycling, or using waste material to create something new – be it with busted truck tyres, discarded beer bottles or bullet casings and bomb shells.

Conservation used to seem pretty straightforward: set aside tracts of nature and they will take care of themselves. It is not so simple anymore. Nature left unmanaged is changing in surprising ways because of the great and accelerating human influences of what is being called the Anthropocene — the new epoch of climate change, species movements and global-scale land-use change. Today, keeping nature functioning the way it did before the Industrial Revolution requires increasingly hard and expensive work.

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Can anyone think why China fell to the barbarians of the West Asian peninsular? (Europe) They succumbed to hubris. As far as they were concerned they had all the answers. They were the Greatest Empire the World had Ever Seen, after all. And so they fell. (With a little help from opium shoveled in by the British.)

Hmm. Where have I seen that attitude before? Ah yes- in the West. Our civilization. We have got Science you see. Science and technology have made us each richer than any medieval king or emperor.

Or have we? When does science morph into religion? Science dies with Dogma and lives with uncertainty.

Take for instance the EM drive. Instead of embracing the empirical evidence as we were taught to by Sir Roger Bacon, we recoil with horror at the heresy of an attack on the Holy Scrolls of Sir Isaac Newton. (Yes, him of the South Sea Bubble.)

The Chinese- not so much. They have just completed a return mission to the moon. And there is poor old Sir Richard Branson dragging his carcass over to have his nose thrust into the consequences of his adventure with fireworks.

And will the Chinese be using the EM drive in the future? How is your Mandarin, long nose?